drought – Meera Subramanian

On the Move: Bilbao to Tarifa, in pursuit of good energy

March 15, 2025 By meerasub Leave a Comment

man bent over paints with a wash of color on wall behind him.

Peregrinations are underway. I’m more than two months into my FRONTIERS fellowship, the first half of which was spent in Bilbao at the Basque Center or Climate (BC3) Change. I came here with the question: can renewable energy projects be built in a way that’s better for biodiversity, people, and place?

It’s complicated.

But like the muralist I caught mid-stream as he transformed a construction blind into a work of art, it takes layers of paint, layers of understanding. I’m thankful for the FRONTIERS grant to have the time to keep digging. The researchers at BC3 helped give me a crash course in understanding the renewable energy landscape, and I’ve been busy conducting dozens of interviews, in Spanish and English, with BC3 staff as well as people all over Spain and in France. They’ve included researchers in agrivoltaics, ornithology and environmental conflict; organizations such as Greenpeace, Eudemon and Renewable Energy Foundation; political representatives such as mayors of small towns with renewable energy projects; reps from renewable energy companies; and many others.

When I arrived in Spain, Biden was still president. A week later, he wasn’t. Nowhere is far enough away from the new president’s wrath. BC3 researchers lost US partners when funding was frozen. A cousin lost his job in Bangkok related to USAID. A friend lost a year’s worth of climate work on New Jersey organic farms. A niece’s new position at NOAA as a fledging applied ecologist feels tenuous. But also, my stepdaughter, who is an environmental lawyer for Earthjustice, was part of the team that just sued Trump and the USDA to release IRA funds that were contractually promised and are now frozen. The lawsuits against the administration are piling up.

Here in Europe, the mood is jittery. (Also, I am fielding the repeated baffled question/accusation: how could you Americans have voted him in … again?!) I attended The Climate Agenda in the New European Legislature and Its Impact in the Basque Country, an event in Bilbao on January 31, when the wrecking ball was taking its first wild swings. Panelists included local politicians and journalists from other parts of Europe, offering a lens into the dynamics and tensions around renewable energy, especially in the wake of the inauguration of Donald Trump. Europe is readying itself for … well, just about anything. There is the tension between the desperate need to ramp up the clean energy transition to achieve energy independence butting against the need to divert resources to build war chests. Bolstering nuclear power keeps coming up. So does resistance:

Also spotted at a news stand:

But I could only do so much from Bilbao. I’m spending the second half of my time here reporting, going to see solar and wind farms that are trying to do things better for birds and farmers and towns. Now, I write from Tarifa, the southernmost tip of Spain, a windy passage where Europe meets Africa, the Atlantic Ocean meets the Mediterranean Sea. It is difficult to concentrate on the screen, because I’ve come here to look at the sky, the bird migration just beginning. Wind turbines spin behind me up the hillsides of Spain, as well as across the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar, atop Morocco’s mountains. It’s a slalom course for migrating birds, but I’m here to see the efforts to lessen the impact.

Tarifa, Spain, looking across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco

I am thankful for a moment of sun. Andalucia, like most of Spain, has been under a deluge of rain. So much that I couldn’t make it to some of the solar farms on my itinerary, so mired they were in mud. The rain is good, in some ways, needed to alleviate a drought, but it’s also coming too quick, too much, rivers rising. Causing a different type of jitters, with the Valencia floods that killed hundreds last fall still in close memory. I stopped in a cafe for a quick coffee and had to step over the barrier constructed to keep out the rain. It wasn’t enough. The man who passed me a steaming cafe con leche said that, a week and half ago, the place was filled with a half-meter of water. Too early to attribute these weeks of rain to climate change, but it fits the pattern of more extreme weather. More drought, followed by heavier, more intense rains.

man outside, and lower part of doorway blocked.

One can only hope that the lush green of this wet spring’s growth is not fuel for wildfires of the future. And that the stories I’m finding offer models that can be implemented—quick! now! yesterday!—to get off fossil fuels and onto clean energy sources in a way that doesn’t cause greater harm or collateral damage. Stay posted for more stories to come.

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

Orion Environmental Writers Workshop Join a community of writers, improve your craft, and reimagine how you think about nature. March 15 (today!) for early bird tuition rate.
Covering Climate Now is offering a free training program aimed at helping newsrooms grow their audiences by telling the climate story better. Check out trainings on offer: Climate Journalism Training Catalog.
The Sharon Begley Science Reporting Award is open for entries. Deadline: April 30.
FRONTIERS open call for round three, specifically for early-career journalists Deadline: May 6, 17:00 (CEST).
Dart Center forJournalism and Trauma, the C.A.R.E.S. (Connecting Audiences, Reporters, Emotions, and Sources) Media Initiative is conducting research to better understand the resources that journalists on the climate/environment beat need to do their work. Take a moment to do this survey.
Trying to keep track of the Trump administration’s dismantling of climate regulations? Options include: “A Running Tally of Trump’s Climate Impacts” from Drilled, and the Climate Backtracker from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School.
NYU Stern Climate Economics Journalism Fellowship will bring a group of journalists to NYU Stern’s Greenwich Village campus, September 18–19, 2025, to learn from globally recognized experts in the emerging field of climate economics. Open to new and experienced journalists (staffers and freelancers) covering the interface between climate and the economy. Here are details and application.

And from the Department of Good News…

A Better World Is Possible, a nonfiction YA graphic novel I’ve been working on with the talented illustrator Danica Novgorodoff is working its way to publication (First Second, 2026). It reveals the pressing danger of the climate crisis through the stories of four youth climate activists who demonstrate the potential of teen power. I’m excited to announce that I received a Grant for Creative Individuals from the Mass Cultural Council that I’ll be putting towards helping this book find its way into the world. THANKS, MCC!

I received the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction for my piece about the decision to donate a kidney, published in the Virginia Quarterly Review last fall. This feels deeply full circle; VQR was so generous to honor my piece about India’s vultures with this prize back in 2011. I was only a few years out of grad school, I hadn’t done any truly long-form, and VQR editor Ted Genoways took a chance on me. When that prize happened, it transformed the trajectory of my struggling freelance life. Truly. To receive the prize again, after all these years, for this piece that felt so risky in a completely different way, is the deepest of honors. Thanks to editor Paul Reyes and the whole VQR team.
I’m also am a True Story Award finalist, for my New Yorker piece, Consider the Vulture.
And I’ll be back in the US soon, for better or worse, in time to give a talk about South Asian vultures—their monumental decline and the efforts to bring them back—for the Brookline Bird Club, April 25, at the Harvard Geological Lecture Hall. In person and on Zoom. More details to come.

I’m reading…

To keep my reading mind in Spain, there’s been Ben Lerner’s Leaving Atocha Station, which exquisitely captured the hungry creative young mind as he makes an infinite number of poor decisions, and I’m midway through Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Shadow of the Wind.
I listened to The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, at the recommendation of my (former) Orion editor, Sumanth Prabhaker. As our own country tumbles towards civil war (slowly, but quickening, according to Jeff Sharlet), I found this exploration of memory and forgetting—when is it necessary to wipe one’s mind clean in order to live in peace?—haunting. And, in spite of there being dragons and knight errants, it reminded me of similar themes explored in Severance, which I am totally hooked on.
I got an early look at Sadie Babits’ forthcoming Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change (Island Press). I had the pleasure of serving with Sadie on the SEJ Board, and she followed me as president. Now, she’s the lead climate editor at NPR. Get this book on your radar!
Erica Berry’s book Wolfish was a brilliant exploration of fear and wildness, and her new piece, “The Fault of Time,” in Emergence, is equally captivating. Here’s her Substack.
I found “The End of Children” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker fascinating and as troubling as it was intended to be. It explored so many facets of the transformation underway, but I also wanted more about the infertility that may be linked to environmental factors, and also the hesitancy I have heard many younger people express about bringing children into a world increasingly ravaged by climate change and other environmental disasters. Still very much worth a read.
And I’ll wait to buy Sewanee School of Letter’s colleague Tiana Clark’s new book of prose poems, Scorched Earth, in person from her this summer, but I had the pleasure of hearing her read some her work in the past. You don’t have to to wait. Available at all the good places (and the bad places, too) where you can buy books.

I leave you with this, pure joy and delight of a song sung in public, crammed in a narrow alley of Old Town, just last night. The rains cancelled Carnaval in Tarifa last week, but they’re happening this weekend. The town is all dressed up. People don themed costumes with their friends and families that are about not about your single individual uniqueness, but about what you can create in concert with your community. I couldn’t catch all the lyrics of this long song, but it seemed a ballad, each stanza ending with a punchline that made the crowd laugh and led to the next round of the story. I’ll have bum-bum-bum-bum-bum running through my head for days, making me smile each time. Hope it’s contagious.

{For video go to Substack}

Be well, friends. Be fierce. Be ready.

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the art of being present

November 13, 2024 By meerasub Leave a Comment

panorama of Colorado River with two rafts in view

Three rounds in the laundry and there’s still sand in my socks. I like the grit that remains. It’s been over a week since we took out from a bucket list rafting trip down the Colorado River. I adventured there with my husband and his eldest, 226 miles of the river’s reach, from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek, traveling into the depths of what this great earth holds, a truly Grand Canyon.

New layers of rock revealed themselves to us each day as our seven boats moved downstream. Six oar boats and one paddle boat. Some of us slipped into kayaks at times. Us twenty guests in a continual rotation between boats, sometimes paddling, deep strokes into deep green cold water, or relaxing through some stretches, or holding on for dear life as we crashed through the rapids of Granite, Horn, Lava Falls. We pulled onto beaches for hikes into slot canyons, or to go swimming in the Little Colorado River, a tributary with otherworldly pastel blue waters. We passed through sacred lands. All of it felt sacred. I kept feeling like I needed to ask permission. I did, and felt (hope) it was granted. Navajo, Havasupai, Hualapai. And something deeper and more eternal, before even those people arrived, when this place was sea, inhabited by sponges, crinoids, brachiopods, lava flowing and transforming, land masses moving.

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United in Change

December 16, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Photo by Meera Subramanian

As a reader I find there are stories that just stick with me; I can’t shake them. But as a journalist, I experience this a thousand-fold. What appears in print can feel like a haiku, with too many interviews and notebook jottings ending up on the cutting room floor. The histories of place I unearthed through research. The letters to the editor in the thin pages of the local newspaper. The anecdotes shared by those who didn’t make it into the piece. The deep story revealed behind and between their words, too big for the bounds of the word-count.

As I finished up each of the nine pieces that were part of the series Finding Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News that I worked on for most of 2017-18, about perceptions of climate change in conservative parts of the country, I would find filaments linking them with each other that I didn’t have room to explore. I’d get tangled in threads leading to stories I’d reported in other parts of the world, a lament I heard from a peach farmer in Georgia echoing what a rice farmer had said in India. There were strands of sinew between what I learned in the field and what I knew from my own personal life, a peripatetic journey that’s granted me multiple vantage points, making me feel at home both nowhere and everywhere at once.

Last year I became a contributing editor of Orion magazine, a publication I’ve read for many years, enjoying the lush richness of its pages, the images and poems and book reviews and NO ADS. (Yes, this is a nonprofit endeavor, and, yes, you can support it by subscribing.) With this piece for Orion, I finally had a chance to reach up for some of those disparate threads that have been floating around in my head since I finished the ICN series and try to weave them into something that made sense. Or, at least, began to make sense. Still, it feels like a haiku. Still, there is so much unsaid at the edges. Because the story of climate change at this moment in time is immense, and shifting. We’re all living this in real-time, the scientists and storytellers and skeptics all. Much of what I found over 18 months of reporting is deeply troubling, the changes underway stirring so much into uncertainty, but I also hold onto the possibility of the disruption as a great opportunity. No rain without thunder and lightning, Frederick Douglass reminded us. And the storm of climate change is here, now. Anything could happen.

The piece begins…

For the past couple of years, I traveled across my country, falling in love with strangers. I sought them out—farmers, ranchers, fly fishermen, evangelicals— and stepped into their lives, uninvited but nearly always, inexplicably, welcome. I sought some kind of connection, asking them questions few seemed to be asking them, about their lives and what they care about and what they believe in. Who they vote for and why. What they remember from before and what they expect in the future, which to their collective grief are often different things.

Read the rest here.

more on Chennai’s water crisis

August 2, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

The summer Southwest monsoon has brought some rain and momentary relief to Chennai, but the question of how to mitigate water shortages (and excesses) are not gone. After my New York Times op-ed last month, I’ve had a chance to speak about water with others interested in the story. These issues are not disappearing anytime soon. From the World Resources Institute:

New data from WRI’s Aqueduct tools reveal that 17 countries – home to one-quarter of the world’s population—face “extremely high” levels of baseline water stress, where irrigated agriculture, industries and municipalities withdraw more than 80% of their available supply on average every year.

I spoke to Mark Goldberg on the Global Dispatches Podcast. In essence, do all the small stuff first: restore wetlands, enforce rainwater catchment mandates, educate on conservation, fix leaky pipes, capture water across the landscape with small-scale systems that work with nature, and not against it. Can India develop a new 21st-century model of sustainable development? The opportunity is still there, though hard to see evidence of embracing such possibility. Listen to the podcast here:

On the BBC’s podcast Beyond Today, I spoke with host Matthew Price about the crisis. BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan also reported from Chennai directly. Have a listen here.

I also make a cameo appearance in this Al Jazeera The Stream news piece, featuring Veena Srinivasan, a senior fellow with Ashoka Trust, Raj Bhagat Palanichamy, a data manager with World Resources Institute India, and T.M. Krishna, a musician, artist, and activist. Watch the episode here:

And then sit back and watch/listen to T.M. Krishna’s haunting song Poromboke:

Chennai’s Water Crisis

July 15, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

While researching and reporting A River Runs Again (aka Elemental India), I explored small-scale, across-the-landscape solutions for water crises in India. Even just a few years later, the world is warmer and there are more people in need of water. When the major South Indian city of Chennai, where my father is from and where many in my extended family live, ran out of piped water during its current drought, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about how India might consider a new approach to development that might embrace the methods I wrote about in the book. Here’s how it begins:

India’s water crisis offers a striking reminder of how climate change is rapidly morphing into a climate emergency. Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.

Chennai, a city of eight million on the Bay of Bengal, depends on the fall monsoon to provide half of the city’s annual rainfall. Last year, the city had 55 percent less rainfall than normal. When the monsoon ended early, in December, the skies dried up and stayed that way. Chennai went without rain for 200 days. As winter passed into spring and the temperature rose to 108 degrees Fahrenheit, its four water reservoirs turned into puddles of cracked mud.

Some parts of the city have been without piped water for five months now. Weary women with brightly colored plastic jugs now await water tankers, sometimes in the middle of the night. On June 20, the delayed summer monsoon arrived as a disappointing light shower.

These water crises are now global and perennial….

Read the rest of “India’s Terrifying Water Crisis” here at The New York Times.